SIGMOD 2010 (Demo Track) Reviews
Reviews for paper Glacier: A Query-to-Hardware Compiler, submitted to SIGMOD 2010 (Demo Track).
Overall rating: accept
Reviewer 1
Relevance: Is this demonstration proposal relevant to SIGMOD?
yes
Technical quality: Is the proposal based on sound principles?
Accept
Novelty: Is the proposal based on novel/recent technology?
Weak Accept
Clarity: Does the proposal contain enough information about what is going to be demonstrated?
Weak Accept
Interactivity: Will the proposed demonstration allow interaction with the audience?
yes
The WOW! factor: Is the proposal impressive?
Weak Accept
Overall recommendation
Accept
Should the proposal be considered for the best demo award?
yes
Rationale for overall recommendation (1 paragraph, 5 lines max)
Glacier is an impressive system for compiling streaming queries directly into FPGA-based hardware. Even though the details of the system has already been published, demonstration at sigmod would provide attendees a good opportunity to see all the steps of hardware generation in action.
Detailed comments and suggested improvements
The demonstration would be more impressive if it included a discussion of the Glacier limitations in the pre sense of limited gate budget. For example Xilinx FPGA may not have enough gates to generate TCAM large enough to hold all the unique groups in grouping operators. Large query sets may go above the gate limit and require non-trivial optimization to figure out which predicates and operators and more important to be pushed into hardware.
Reviewer 2
Relevance: Is this demonstration proposal relevant to SIGMOD?
yes
Technical quality: Is the proposal based on sound principles?
Accept
Novelty: Is the proposal based on novel/recent technology?
Accept
Clarity: Does the proposal contain enough information about what is going to be demonstrated?
Accept
Interactivity: Will the proposed demonstration allow interaction with the audience?
yes
The WOW! factor: Is the proposal impressive?
Weak Accept
Overall recommendation
Accept
Should the proposal be considered for the best demo award?
no
Rationale for overall recommendation (1 paragraph, 5 lines max)
The demo presents interesting, novel technology in an easily accessible way, and much thought went into making it compatible with a conference demo slot. It is based on a arecent VLDB paper, and includes a general demo script and interactivity opportunities. It should be a fun demo.
Detailed comments and suggested improvements
SOme sort of comparison with software-based approaches would be nice...
Reviewer 3
Relevance: Is this demonstration proposal relevant to SIGMOD?
yes
Technical quality: Is the proposal based on sound principles?
Weak Accept
Novelty: Is the proposal based on novel/recent technology?
Accept
Clarity: Does the proposal contain enough information about what is going to be demonstrated?
Accept
Interactivity: Will the proposed demonstration allow interaction with the audience?
yes
The WOW! factor: Is the proposal impressive?
Accept
Overall recommendation
Weak Accept
Should the proposal be considered for the best demo award?
yes
Rationale for overall recommendation (1 paragraph, 5 lines max)
The proposal is to demonstrate Glacier (pvldb 2009), which is a query-to-FPGA compiler for streaming queries. The demo will illustrate the details of this compilation process. This would be a good educational experience for database audience to see FPGA in action.
Detailed comments and suggested improvements
One of the major motivations of using FPGA in Glacier is to deal with high network package rate. The observation is that the network stack on a commodity machine is not good enough to handle such high rate.
However, recent work in the networking community (RouteBricks, SOSP'09) shows that commodity machines can be used to implement a 35Gbps network router. If packet switching routers can be implemented with commodity machines, one would imagine data stream processing can be supported too. Therefore, the above motivation needs re-evaluation.
Related Information
- submission (PDF)
- final paper (PDF) — published at SIGMOD 2010